This post - with background links above - outlines how GOP is now a party of dictators and pedophiles where only passing laws to destroy the country matter (its why they are willing to sink so low, they aren't patriots to begin with).First Note: SNL Asks GOP: After Allegations Against Roy Moore, How Low Can It Go?SNL imagines Mike Pence and Jeff Sessions gently asking Roy Moore to step out of the Senate race.Trump Responds:Trump defends Roy Moore to reporters - President Trump defended embattled Alabama Republican Roy Moore, all but endorsing the Senate candidate who has been accused of sexual assault, adding, "We don't need a liberal person in there, a Democrat, Jones."Source: CNN

Trump biographer: Trump deeply would like to be a dictatorTony Schwartz co-wrote "The Art of the Deal" with Donald Trump and he thinks the thought of starting World War III excites Trump. Schwartz also contributed to the new book, "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump." He joins Joy Reid to discuss the mental stability of the President. Duration: 6:06

Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney appeared on Sunday news shows and lied about the effects of the House and Senate tax bills. In their current forms, the bills will raise taxes for many middle-income Americans, provide a tax break for wealthy Americans and corporations, and significantly increase the deficit.

On Fox Broadcasting Co.’s Fox News Sunday, Mnuchin mischaracterized the bill by claiming that “middle-income people are getting cuts, and rich people are getting very little cuts or in very certain cases increases.” In fact, under the Senate version of the bill, families earning less than $75,000 will see a tax increase while the wealthiest Americans and corporations will see ratesgo down and enjoy special carve outs, including a tax exemption for private jet management. Host Chris Wallace also pointed out that the nonpartisan Joint Committee on Taxation estimated that the bill that just passed the House of Representatives would give “80 percent of its cuts to corporations, businesses, and wealthy families.” From the November 19 edition of Fox News Sunday:

Similarly, on CNN’s State of the Union, Mulvaney falsely claimed that the Senate bill “absolutely [would] not” cost at least $1.5 trillion, in direct contradiction a number ofstudies that estimate the cost of the bill would be as high as $1.8 trillion. From the November 19 edition of State of the Union:

During a July 26 event at the White House, President Donald Trump and Republican Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin announced that Taiwanese electronics company Foxconn had agreed to open a new manufacturing facility in Wisconsin, claiming that it would eventually employ up to 13,000 people in exchange for "$3 billion in tax breaks and other subsidies over the next 15 years." (Foxconn “says it will create 3,000 jobs with the potential of generating 13,000.”) According to reports, the company, which has become notorious in China "for worker suicides, accidents and labor disturbances," could end up having difficulty even finding enough workers to staff the facility.

A CNN panel discussing the yet-to-be created jobs praised the president, crediting Trump with "a huge win." Reporters have already spent months promoting Trump's exaggerated jobs announcements (See: Alibaba, Carrier, Ford, SoftBank), many of which have failed to materialize or had little to do with him, and the fawning coverage of his latest media spectacle shows that the lessons remain to be learned. From the July 27 edition of CNN's Inside Politics:

The strange saga of Roy Moore’s senatorial bid in Alabama has made one thing clear: Nobody should doubt that the GOP is the modern political party most eager to rig election results—even when the target is a fellow Republican.

Recent days have seen the best minds in the current generation of Republican strategists contorting election rules in every imaginable way to try to stop Moore from becoming Alabama’s junior U.S. senator next month.

Some of these exchanges have been chronicled on election law blogs, where for years, Republicans have defended their catalog of partisan voter suppression tactics (led by the big lie they were protecting the process from hordes of Democrats impersonating other voters, despite never offering serious proof). But now that an apparent sexual predator is refusing to exit the race, despite calls by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other top Republicans, the party’s best and brightest have been exploring every possible angle, including canceling December’s special election.

Astoundingly, as of Thursday, the stop-Moore contingent has come up empty-handed. They have been thwarted by the calendar, Alabama’s sitting Republican governor and small details like the U.S. Constitution's 17th Amendment (in part governing the election of senators after a vacancy). But how they tried!

Perhaps the best exchange was captured on ElectionLawBlog.org, where scholar and blog founder Rick Hasen recounted his to-and-fro tweets with conservative media personality Hugh Hewitt, who, “at first… suggested canceling the election altogether, and letting [Alabama Sen. Luther Strange, who lost a primary to Moore] just complete the term.”

That was a wonderful addition to Republican voter suppression canon: don't hold an election at all.

Yet a close analysis of the 663 promises Trump made on the campaign trail shows how few he has kept, and how many more he has broken. Trump’s promises about what he would accomplish in his first 100 days are not the first vows pegged to a key milestone that were summarily ignored or broken. As a candidate, Trump made several pledges about the first paper he would sign, as well as what would he would do during his first minute and first hour as president. He kept none of them. On his first day in office, Trump failed to keep 34 different promises of what he said he would do on Day One in the White House — and fulfilled just two. In total, during his first month in office, Trump broke 64 promises. He kept just seven of his promises in that first month.

The arrival of Donald J. Trump feels like the completion of the cycle I was writing about in the early George W. Bush years. It is all too easy to get caught up in the moment, though fears are understandably high, and not think about the deep-seated anomalies and contradictions in the body politic that have brought America to the cusp of out-and-out fascism. Even if Trump’s policies turn out in the end to be not as fearsome as he has repeatedly stated, his explicit persona and policy positions take us very far out of the realm of normal democracy. It has become fashionable lately to excuse George W. Bush for being a “moderate” in comparison with Trump, but it should not be forgotten that Bush was the original American fascist; everything Trump, or a future would-be authoritarian, might do is predicated on the radical innovations Bush introduced in our political style, subverting the constitution and changing the balance between liberty and security in ways that have had permanent impact.

We need to remind ourselves that the early years of the Bush administration felt utterly radical, that the defense of freedom of speech and mobility, of the civility and respect that make a constitutional democracy work, never felt so threatened, never felt more precious and worth saving, as in those years. That feeling, unfortunately, is gone now, despite Trumpism and whatever else will follow, because the anti-constitutional innovations have become normalized. This happened particularly because the succeeding Democratic administration did not take any steps to counter, philosophically, any of the constitutional violations, or even the disrespect for science, reason and empiricism that had deeply saturated the public discourse.

Again we need to remind ourselves of how events took place in the Bush years with incomprehensible speed and bombast, of how shocking it was to deal with such phenomena as torture, rendition, black sites, enemy combatants, the loss of habeas corpus, open-ended surveillance, registration, mass deportation, stripping Americans of citizenship and political assassination — the de facto end of the Bill of Rights.

By looking back at the important polemics and tracts that came out in the middle of the last decade in response to the Bush administration’s innovations — after some time had elapsed since the instigating event of 9/11 and passions had cooled a little — we are reminded that the degree of acceptance of the new mythologies of fear was very great and the degree of skepticism toward them, even among scholars and thinkers, was minute in comparison. Over the course of the years, though there were numerous opportunities to do so, the reckoning (with crimes against humanity) never came, the accountability and ethical reevaluation of the new establishing myths of the security state never came to pass. I believe that in the long run of history, these missed opportunities to correct course will assume greater and greater importance as we proceed further along the same path.

Perhaps some of my musings about the plans the Bush administration may have had in case of a “second terror attack” might have been a little overwrought at the time. But this was the hothouse atmosphere of 2001-2003, when anything was possible, and ideas such as a Patriot Act II or total surveillance such as John Poindexter was then dreaming up, did not seem far-fetched.

One could also argue that many of the tools of surveillance and of the abridgment of movement and expression I postulated as occurring in response to a second major terror attack transpired anyway, and that there was no second terror attack because the last 16 years represent an ongoing low level of terror that never fully recedes and has already given the bureaucrats enough time to develop fearsome tools against privacy and anonymity, except that they have occurred in such secrecy, or in the guise of normal intelligence or police work, that they have attracted less attention than the announcement of, let’s say, the TIA (total information awareness) program.

A national ID (Real ID) did in fact happen later in the decade, and now that it exists it can be hardened, made more data-sensitive, or encompass greater intrusions against privacy, depending on the will of bureaucrats. Data mining, increased computer sophistication and capability, and the erosion of public faith in privacy as the primary liberal value have contributed to the worst fears I speculated about all those years ago already coming to realization.

The most dire set of worries I outlined in the early Bush era may not all have come true then, but certainly Trump’s rhetoric is headed in that direction. It is important to know exactly why Trump is not a historical anomaly, and to understand how he is rooted in a discourse that has been central to our culture for a while now. This means that 9/11 was not a passing event, but was a true revolution, persistent today, and should be expected to be the defining paradigm well into the future. Because there was no real liberal dissent toward Obama’s continuation and even strengthening of many of Bush’s extra-constitutional metamorphoses, we have become well and truly desensitized by now.

The Obama presidency is best viewed as a passing interlude between Bush and Trump. The kind of neoliberal managerialism (along with insistent minority-group identity politics, which ultimately played into white nationalism) to which Obama was beholden was bound to lead to a further collapse of democratic values, as indeed has happened. But it is important to value historical memory, and note again the forks in the road during the Obama presidency where things could have taken a different path.

If we look at fear of the “rage” of the Muslim in previous manifestations, such as Bernard Lewis, Samuel Huntington, Christopher Hitchens or Bernard-Henri Lévy’s polemics in the early Bush years, and then we come down to Trump’s calls for a Muslim ban and almost explicit articulations of ethnic cleansing and genocide, then the Obama presidency, with the missed opportunity of the Arab Spring, yet again appears as a hopeless intermission.

As a public intellectual, playwright and longtime foundation executive, Colin Greer has a unique view on politics and grassroots-oriented change. Formerly a CUNY professor and an expert on education and immigration—he wrote The Great School Legend along with nine other books—he was a founder of Change Magazine and Social Policy Magazine, and was a contributing editor to Parade Magazine for 17 years. Since 1985, he has been president of the New World Foundation, one of the few philanthropies in America that primarily funds grassroots organizing. He also chairs the boards of the Stella Adler Studio of Acting and the Lark Theatre. Greer is a board member of the Independent Media Institute, the parent organization for AlterNet.

Don Hazen: Trump's scapegoating and lies are causing emotional trauma for many Americans, especially immigrants and people who have been sexually and emotionally abused. Do you agree that this trauma has been heightened by Trump?

Colin Greer: I don't actually agree that the trauma is new. No, I think that Americans have suffered trauma at a high level since that election in 2000 when the Supreme Court gave the election to George Bush in Florida.

DH: Because of the court decision?

CG: Yes, absolutely. First of all, there was a real sense that what we believed in actually did not work. Everybody knew the decision was not true, that it was a lie. The court voted against its own standard—that is States’ Rights, right? We were suddenly seeing corruption at the highest level. Then Bush and Cheney took us to an unnecessary war that we learned very quickly to have no basis—no evidence for it—despite mass U.S. protests, which were shown to be meaningless to those in power. ...[T]he intelligence was wrong—in fact, contrived—but they drove us to war.

DH: So Bush is getting off lightly, here in 2017?

CG: Absolutely. That war continues. It has destroyed stability in the world, especially in the Middle East. It intensified terrorism to a level we had not seen it before. It mobilized ethnic Muslim communities all over the world into being enemies of us because of the invasion of Iraq. It destroyed the economy that Obama inherited. [We were] facing intensified loss already under way since Regan showed what limited leverage organized labor possessed. Then, we were powerless to influence the terms of the capitalist theft that was the bail-out, and since which the basic security of workers has been badly undermined and health care out of reach for many Americans so that injury and disease was able to destroy families. Bush, et al., probably had the most traumatic effect of any administration since the early part of the 20th century.

Quotes

"Make peace with the universe. Take joy in it. It will turn to gold. Resurrection will be now. Every moment, a new beauty." - Rumi

"God is a metaphor for that which transcends all levels of intellectual thought. It's as simple as that." - Joseph Campbell

"Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history." - Carl Jung

"Of all the animosities which have existed among mankind, those which are caused by difference of sentiments in religion appear to be the most inveterate and distressing, and ought most to be deprecated. I was in hopes that the enlightened and liberal policy, which has marked the present age, would at least have reconciled Christians of every denomination so far that we should never again see the religious disputes carried to such a pitch as to endanger the peace of society." - George Washington

“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it's not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.” - Dalai Lama

“Be empty of worrying. Think of who created thought! Why do you stay in prison. When the door is so wide open?” ― Rumi